"As
night fall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both
instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged.
And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change
in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the
darkness."U. S. Supreme Court Justice William Douglas in 1976

I was
running late, on my way to a Westside book soirée for David
Korn and the Scheer Boys (Robert & Christopher)
and their timely tomes about Bush’s (various
and sundry) Lies,
when Kim said there was a guy on the phone asking how I knew American
soldiers were raping
Iraqi women.

“Huh?”
I replied.

Kim
shrugged.

“Another
crackpot,” I figured. “Give him the e-mail address. Do not give him
the office address.” One war-loving
bozo threatening to throw acid in our faces was more than enough.

“Okay, but he wants to talk to you.”

“Of course, he does. Give him the number to call the show Saturday
night, and we’ll chat about it on the air.”

“Okay…” I heard Kim repeat my words to whoever was on the phone as
I slipped on my jacket. Then she stopped me again. “He says he won’t
call the show, and he’s going to report that you refuse to answer questions
for his article in the Boston Globe.”

Yikes.
This was more than just another right-wing lunatic. This was a right-wing
lunatic with a readership of over 3 million. I took the
phone. “Charlie Radin from the Boston Globe, Jerusalem office,” the
friendly but forceful Yankee twang informed me. And to what did
I owe the pleasure? His world-weary sigh told me I’d better sit
down. Then his weirder-than-my-weirdest-nightmare of a story tumbled
out.

According
to my new pal Charlie, the biggest Islamist newspaper in Turkey, Yeni
Safak, had published a front page article alleging
that US troops were raping thousands of Iraqi women, and their primary
“source” for this explosive allegation was none other than little old
moi.

What? I had never said any such thing. Which Kafka novel had I just
wandered into?

I
had written several columns critical of the war. In one of the pieces,
published in mid-April, 2003, entitled “Rape
of Iraq,”
I used "rape" as a metaphor for the American invasion.. But
I had never said, in writing, on the air or even in conversation, that
Americans were literally raping Iraqi women. Using me as a “source”
for the allegation that American troops were committing literal rapes
against Iraqi women would be farcical if it weren’t so terrible. Talk
about LIES. This was a whopper. But then, the Neo-War
on Terror seems to be a Battle of Lies Against Counter-Lies, with
blood-lusty faith-based frauds on both sides of the battlefield.

Needless
to say, I don’t know if American troops are raping Iraqi women. I
do know they’ve killed Iraqi women, as well as men and children,
because, like everybody else, I’ve seen the pictures and read the reports.
I think death is a substantially worse fate than rape. But that’s just
my opinion.

Apparently,
a lot of people, including some Islamists, think that rape is worse
than death. I am told that this has something to do with
the way they twist and turn the words of the Koran into misogynist
contortions that confound the Western mind. Of course, we Westerners
can just turn to our own Christian fundamentalists, some of whom maintain
that it’s better to let a woman die in childbirth than allow her to
have an abortion, to understand just how religion can be perverted
into murderous imperatives based on nothing but sexual taboos and intense
patriarchal paranoia.

I
asked Charlie if he’d actually read “Rape of Iraq.” He had not. Off
went the jacket and down I sat, diligently e-mailing him a link
to the piece online, as well as a couple of my other related articles,
“Bukkake
Bombing Crusade” and “Sex,
Lies and WMDs,” to show him that
though I have never written about literal rapes in Iraq, I have often
used various aspects of sex as metaphors for the war.

For
instance, back in the summer of ’02, when Dubya was first squawking
like a barnyard fowl about invading Iraq, and Saddam was reacting
with his signature mafioso
swagger, I wrote
“Cockfight
in the Baghdad Corral.” Needless to say, I didn’t mean that
the two leaders were literally going to strip down and duke it out
naked in the desert--though that could have been interesting, and a
lot less destructive for the rest of us. I was using “Cockfight” as
a metaphor for Bush’s and Saddam’s treacherous macho strutting.

Similarly,
I called the actual American invasion of Iraq a “rape,” since that
seemed to be an apt metaphor for the way we brutally inserted ourselves
into this weakened, sanction-wracked country without anything close
to “consent” from said country or the rest of the world. This was
the rape of a land and its history, the bombing of homes
and
infrastructure,
the
killing
and maiming of thousands of citizens, the looting of stores and museums.
Though these things may be just as bad or (in my opinion) a lot worse
than the literal rape of a
woman, they are obviously not the same thing. Only a fool or a miscreant
would say otherwise.

Satisfied
I’d given Charlie sufficient reading material to enlighten him, I
grabbed my jacket and went off to Stanley Sheinbaum’s
lovely home to honor The
Five Biggest LIES Bush Told Us About Iraqand The
Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception,
all the while fretting about the Islamist lies about me (pourquoi
moi?) spreading around the mosques and cafés of Istanbul.
With both sides of the Terror Wars competing to tell the biggest, most
frightening fibs, where did that leave the peace-hungry liberals among
us? Sipping wine and eating cheese, that’s where.

“Here
we are in Hollywood, the capital of storytelling,” I addressed the
august progressive assemblage which included Robert Greenwald, Tom
Hayden and Cindy Asner, “but the Bushies and the Islamists
are beating us at our own game.
Their stories have captured the American imagination. Don’t
we have better storytellers than they have?” Everyone nodded, but no
one had an answer, and neither did I.

I
raced home full of camembert and cabernet (don’t worry, I wasn’t
driving), and called my pal Charlie to see if he’d read “Rape of
Iraq.”
It being morning in Jerusalem, he was just having his coffee. “It’s
obvious that you’re using “rape” as a metaphor,” he assured me. I felt
a waterfall of relief wash over me; at least, there was some value
to the truth, even in terrorized times.

“But
this thing has gone way beyond what you wrote,” he continued (speaking
of truth, for the purpose of storytelling, and since I didn’t
tape record him, I am paraphrasing Charles Radin’s words here). “Yeni
Safak is a very popular publication in Turkey. A lot of people read
that piece where you are quoted—or, excuse me, as I see now, misquoted--as
the primary source for saying that American soldiers are raping Iraqi
women.
It’s all over the street.”

So
much for the truth.

“The story got so big that the American Embassy in Turkey issued a
statement about you.”

Oy. Usually,
one to fan the flames of publicity, I felt myself melting in the
conflagration.

EMBASSY STATEMENT
Ankara, October 23
A front-page article in yesterday's "Yeni Safak" newspaper
carried the false claim that U.S. forces have been responsible for
the rape of thousands of Iraqi women since the beginning of the conflict
in Iraq. These outrageous allegations were based on a U.S. "source" best
known for her pornographic web-sites and erotic television program.
We believe it is irresponsible for a serious newspaper to present such
false claims from a clearly unreliable source on its front page as
if they were fact. We view this article as a deliberate attempt to
mislead Turkish readers and to damage the strong ties between the Turkish
and American people.”

Charlie
awaited my reaction like a hunter; confident his prey will enter
the trap. I took a deep breath and didn’t bite, not at first. “If
the American Embassy wants to write about what they call my ‘pornographic
websites
and
erotic
TV
program,’
that’s fine,” I said evenly. “The way people describe what I do says
more about them than me.” Charlie was obviously disappointed. Where
was my
outrage? I relished his frustration, then wound up taking the bait:
“But why do they call me an ‘unreliable source’ when I wasn’t a source
at all?” Here
I was, ridiculously and atrociously misquoted by a gang
of thuggish tabloid hacks drinking way too much Turkish coffee,
then hung
out to dry by my own embassy, blithely expanding upon the lie
the Islamists had
started.

“Why
not just say that I never made these "claims?" Why continue
their lie?” I asked Charlie. But even as I spoke, I knew my question
was naïve. The American Commander-in-Chief
hadn't bothered to make sure that Saddam really had WMDs before
invading
Iraq, so why would some tunnel-visionary American Embassy press apparatchik
bother to do his homework (and actually read the so-called “source”
material) before spitting out a press release? Moreover, this horny
little apparatchik just couldn’t resist holding up my lacy panties
like a flag to his famously prudish readers, as if to say: “Look, look,
she’s not just a stinking liberal, she’s a filthy pornographer!”

“But
that’s not the worst part…” Charlie had that you-better-sit-down
tone to his voice again. I was already seated, but my heart sank
into
the floor as he continued, “Did you hear about the guy who blew himself
up in the HSBC bank in Istanbul, killing 12 people?”

"Yes,"
I said. I remembered reading that the suicide-bomber’s
son had said that before his father had gone off to kill himself
and
12 other people, he had been upset over news that American soldiers
were raping Iraqi women. I hadn’t connected this with my “Rape of Iraq”
piece at the time; after all, “Rape of Iraq” wasn’t about literal rapes.
Even Charlie could see that! But here he was, connecting the dots of
blood to me…

“Oh
no…” I murmured, horrified but still vaguely aware that my new confidant
was a right-slanting reporter who would quote me as “admitting
responsibility” or “regretting” what I wrote, or some such nonsense,
if I so much as apologized. Or maybe even if I didn’t. So I just sucked
in my sadness and anger, silently mourning the deaths of these innocents
immolated in the madness of Ilyas Kuncak (the suicide
bomber),
linked to me through a web of lies.

“How
do you feel about that?” I heard Charlie asking me, poking around
for a juicy emotional quote. I felt like throwing up, and I
mumbled something about being “appalled,” as
I pictured everyday men and women filling out their deposit slips,
then suddenly exploding into bits of flesh and bone and sorrow, permanent
withdrawals, each leaving behind his or her own
rippling circles of grief.

“So I gotta write this piece,” Charlie was saying, almost apologetically.
“It’s a big story, and you’re in the middle of it, even though you
had nothing to do with it.”

“When
is it coming out?” I asked meekly, wondering whether I was on trial
or had become a cockroach.

“That
I can’t tell you,” he was back to his ratatat reporter self. “I file
it in a day or two, then I’m off
to Thailand for a little R&R.”

“Can
you e-mail me a heads-up before it appears?”

“No, no e-mail, no computers, nothing. When I get away from the insanity,
I get away.”

So
Charlie was going to write whatever Charlie was going to write, that
being his right. And then he would make his getaway. But since
the American Embassy, my embassy, still had its nasty little lie-based
press release up on their website, I felt I had to set the record straight.
It was now mid-morning in Turkey, so I figured I’d give the culprits
a buzz. I think they were slightly shocked and awed to hear from
the so-called “source” of the rape rumors herself. When I finally
got
Chief Embassy
Press Officer Joseph (Joe) Pennington on the phone, he gave me his
full attention,
making sure I had his cell
phone number, brushing off my waking him in the middle of the night,
and promising to print a letter from me on the front page of the
Embassy website
correcting their egregious error.
Joe even suggested I sue Yeni Safak for libel. When I said I didn’t
know any Turkish attorneys, he replied that he could find one for me.
I declined, but was impressed that he wasn't treating me like the “unreliable…pornographer”
his press release had said I was. Maybe that was because by
the
time,
he returned
my call, he’d made it a point to actually read the article.

Though,
naturally, I couldn’t sleep. I have no idea what Kuncak’s victims
looked like, but they haunted me, as did the faces of the children
blown to bits by Shock and Awe, as did the body parts of the young
American soldiers being killed in Iraq as “occupiers" almost daily.

As
predicted, Charlie didn’t let me know when the piece was published.
I found out through an avalanche of e-mail from Boston Globe readers
who not only wanted to blame (and hang) me for Kuncak’s killings, but
for various other Islamist atrocities, not to mention all ill will
born by Muslims toward Americans, as well as all combat-related deaths
in Iraq since Bush announced the “end to major combat operations.”
As the piece came out just after the holidays, the e-mails calling
me “traitor” and “bitch” started invading my box while I was in the
South of France
(where all the best traitors and bitches go en vacances).
Ah, nothing like a few letters from home to make you proud to be an
American… I’ve
excerpted some here:

Rape of IraqLetters from Home

W A R N I N G Some of the following e-mails contain foul language, as well
as explicit sexual, violent and religious imagery, which may not
be appropriate for children. Editor’s
Note: E-mails
have been cut for space, but typos, misspellings and other errors
and
idiosyncrasies have been left unmolested.

Sent: Sunday, January 04, 2004 8:21 AM
Subject: Susan Block
From: kpellone@prodigy.net
Dear Susan, You are causing Americans to die because of your leftist
perverted lies about America and Iraq….Fuck you, your gays, your Muslims,
your socialists and communists and all others who serve Satan…Like
the immputant Muslims, you fight a losing battle to ! destroy the Judeo-Christian
God and his followers. On your death bed remember these words and ask
God for forgivness or accept Satans painful grasp. It is your choice
ass-hole. Love, and God Bless your ignorant heart, Kevin

Sent: Sunday, January 04, 2004 8:07 AM
Subject: Rape???
From: Jvboog@aol.com
I am appalled by your statements regarding American soldiers raping
thousands of Iraqi's…You are an incredibly horrible person and you
deserve to be driven out of this country.

Sent: Sunday, January 04, 2004 12:25 PM
Subject: TREASONOUS
From: BonDud@aol.com
You should be tried for treason. You knew VERY WELL what you wrote
would cause concern and YOU are responsible for the deaths from the
suicide bombers who believe our soldiers are raping these women. YOU
SHOULD BE HANGED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You CERTAINLY don't deserve
the protectioin living in the US affords you. Move to another country
and see gow long your porn crap survives… I can picture Al Gore now,
having his picture taken with Osama bin Laden, with the hope of peace
from the bombings in the US…GO GWB!!!!! Bonnie Dudley
PS may the next terrorist get YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We can
only hope.

Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2004 6:04 AM
Subject: Mail for Ms. Susan
From: sayger2@vei.net
Ma'am: As I read the article I sense an anger in you which I know was
not diminished in any way by the writing…but I do realize that you
are a very intelligent woman and one who needs Jesus Christ in her
life badly - because only He can save you from this anger which can
destoy you. Sam Sayger Hernando, MS 662 233 0339

Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2004 11:16 AM
Subject: Iraq
From: TelEqSal@aol.com
After seeing the report that you alone are responsible for your own
suicide bomber--how do you feel about it? As a typical liberal you
probably will have a million excuses why you're "NOT REALLY " responsible,
you in fact, are. Congratulations on using your status as a "sex
educator" to kill people. I think what you probably need is a
real man to take your mind off of things you have no conception of.

Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2004 7:09 PM
Subject: You selfish idiot
From: marisaurgo@hotmail.com
Oh, Lord Jesus! May He save you… If you weren't so damn stupid, I would
say you are evil.

Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2004 7:26 PM
Subject: Comments
From: zponape@comcast.net
I am not in disagreement with your web site; however, I am in disagreement
with your outrageous comments about rape in Iraq. You ought to know
by now that the uneducated in the Muslim countries will spread rumors
as real at the drop of a hat. Your bad choice of words was repeated
an equally ignorant publication called the Boston Globe who left wing
mentality is equal to Hitler’s Brown Shirts.

Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2004 2:20 PM
Subject: Responsible for the death of innocent citizens in Turkey because
of your evil tongue
From: signaramarsvl@qwest.net
You guys are the most worthless piece of trash that this country has
produced you use sex to make money you cause hatred and evil to spread
threw this world while you cash in and you even kill people in other
countries by writing shit on the internet like the car bomb in turkey
was because of you and others around you. Well tell the devil hi for
me when you meet him!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And
so on. A couple days into the onslaught, I received the most prominent
right-wing crackpot response to date: James
Taranto of The Wall Street Journal online dubbed me
“Saddam’s Sex Therapist.” At least he didn’t call me Saddam’s Hair
Stylist. Things could always be worse.

Still,
all in all, I was laid pretty low. Not only was
I feeling wrenching grief for the people who died in the bank explosion--or
as much wrenching grief as a “stupid… shallow… evil… treasonous…
typical liberal” like me can feel. Not only was I wondering if I
was indeed the “worthless
piece of trash” that all these arbiters of taste, goodness, patriotism
and punctuation claimed I was. I was constantly looking over my
shoulder for one of my e-mail pen pals to goosestep out of cyberspace,
throw a noose
around my neck and hang me. Then, I’d imagine, he or she would toss
my wretched corpse into one of Bush’s famous Free Speech Zones, where
I could exercise my First Amendment rights to my dead heart’s content.

Flying
into New York on Orange Alert, I worried that the friendly customs
folks would look up my passport on their computers,
see “Saddam’s Sex Therapist” or “filthy cunny hole” and send me back
to Cannes.
I know, it’s neurotic, but less controversial journalists have been
turned away from America’s welcoming arms in recent months.

I
even found myself wondering if my “choice of words” in “Rape of Iraq”
was indeed ill-conceived. After all, Pat Robertson and Jerry
Falwell had blamed gays, feminists and the ACLU for 9/11, so why should
I be blameless? I contemplated self-censorship, wondering if maybe
I should have been less graphic, like, called it the “Nonconsensual
Ravishment
of Iraq.”

Then
I snapped out of it. Why was I letting these willfully thickheaded
neo-fascists get to me? They were as bad as the Islamist fanatics
who misquoted
me. The facile lies, the crazed religiosity, the proud
ignorance, and the violent, you’re-either-with-us-or-against-us, frothing-at-the
mouth, anti-sex hatred was the same, just with different names, different
languages, different shades of brown.

In
the Biblical sense, it's a Battle of Brothers, Ishmael and Isaac,
sons of Abraham, brothers of shame.
Ishmael’s own father Abraham cast him out of his house into the wilderness.
Isaac felt that same father’s knife against his throat, ready
to kill him as a “sacrifice” to God. Through
myth and procreation, Ishmael and Isaac, the two traumatized sons
of Abraham, spawned tribes that spawned nations “under God,” nations
at
war. Now I had become a pawn in the divine fratricide.

Of
course, I’m not the only one. I am but one of many billions through
the ages, shunted hither and yon by religious terror warriors. Bush
II’s loathsome little war was launched on a pack of lies boiling
in a pot
of cooked
data.
Lies about
WMD, lies about Saddam’s relations with Osama, lies about how
much the “Iraqi People” wanted America to invade—uh, liberate--their
country. Millions of Americans (not to mention the majority of the
rest of the
world) opposed this war passionately, vociferously, and with metaphors.
Many of these protestors and dissenters have had their patriotism questioned,
their reputations slandered, their spouses exposed, their records subpoenaed,
their lives endangered, their names put on lists for nothing but
their
stance
against Bush’s
War.

I
am, as far as I know, the only one with the WSJ-endowed title of
“Saddam’s Sex
Therapist.” Wow. Wonder what that entails...Do your kegel exercises,
Saddam! Don't neglect your sexual health just because you've been captured!
We'll
talk about
your fantasies of Britney Spears being your prison guard in our
next session...

Interestingly,
around the time that Taranto was merrily scourging me and the “anti-American
left” as the reason “why they
hate
us,” one of his Journal colleagues, Peggy Noonan, was busy misquoting
the Pope, saying he’d given the papal thumbs up to Mel Gibson’s
gory new
film The Passion of the Christ, uttering the Holy
Endorsement, “It is as it was.” Pope John Paul II's longtime personal
secretary,
Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz, immediately asserted that the pontiff
had never said any such thing nor does His Holiness ever make Signs
of the Thumb to endorse any movie. Of course, the damage (or promotion)
had already been done, and Gibson’s film got the boost it coveted. Jesus. I
never thought I’d identify with the Pope. But here we were, both
being dangerously misconstrued by WSJ columnists
within a few short news days of each other.

So,
excuse me for using sexual metaphors yet again, but I feel as if
my words were abducted, forced to wear a burqa, brutalized, misused
and abused by a gang of crazed Islamists, after which I was cast
out by
my own Embassy
and
then stoned
by my
own countrymen and women, kind of like the way
some men will punish their own wives and daughters when they have
been
raped.

But
I stand by my words, and I would write them again, knowing what I
now know. Why? First, if
I had not written "Rape of Iraq," could that possibly
have saved the lives of those innocents burned up in Kuncak's
bombing?
No. The liars would have found ways
to
spin
their lies without me. Where there’s a will, there’s a lie. And obviously,
Yeni Safak had the will. Recently, I had someone translate the
Yeni Safak piece from Turkish to
English for me, and its statements about me and my writings are full of
Turkish camel crap mixed with a few too many whiffs of the hookah..
Clearly,
Yeni Safak was bent upon claiming that Americans were
raping "thousands" of Iraqi women and, if they hadn't "found" me,
they would have
misused somebody else as a “source,” and Kuncak would have believed
it (if that was indeed his motive), and committed his dirty deed.

Second,
almost a year later, I must say that "Rape of Iraq" holds up rather
well. I wrote it in a burst of emotion while
the first American “victory”
tanks
rolled
into Baghdad,
as
the bombing
continued
and
the looting
began. I called the invasion a rape and not a murder because in invading
Iraq, we didn’t kill it. We didn’t destroy this great and ancient
country, home of so much of our civilization's ancestry in
Sumer, Babylonia and Ur. I called it a rape because
rape
is an act
of
violent
penetration,
humiliation
and subjugation that doesn’t
(necessarily)
destroy the victim, but attempts to use her or him to satisfy the
rapist’s desires.

Rapists
often make excuses for their actions, i.e., She wanted it…I
thought she wanted it… She was dressed like a slut. So the architects
of the American invasion of Iraq have made their excuses: There
were WMD…We thought there were WMD… Saddam was a dangerous man and
we needed
to take him out for humanitarian reasons. Just as rape gives sex a
bad name, the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq has given humanitarian
military intervention a bad name.

The figurative similarities between rape and the Bushies’ brutal,
balls-out invasion of Iraq are even more painfully obvious now than
they were before. The deplorable conditions of post-war Iraq say
it all:
this was a forced entry. Most of us don’t search our TV sets for “Smiling
Iraqis” anymore. We now know what we’ve done, even if some of us don’t
care to admit it. Even my most self-righteous hate mailers can’t say
that the metaphor was wrong.

And metaphor was all I meant it to be. I wasn’t referring to individual
American troops raping Iraqi women or anybody else.

Then,
oddly, or maybe not so oddly, shortly after the Globe’s report on
“Rumors of Rape” and Taranto's tizzy, the Denver
Post published an article about confirmed
reports of American troops actually raping--not Iraqis--but other
American
troops.
What
a sad, disturbing irony. What a dirty little war.

By
the way, just to set another record straight, allegorically sticking
it between the fat oil-drenched cheeks of the lying, war-gaming, Constitution-trashing
drunken sailors in the Bush House does NOT make me a Saddam
Lover. It
makes
me a
sodomy lover.

And if you don’t think that’s a metaphor, have I got a war to sell
you…

Dr.Susan
Block's "soul-searching... essays (on the War)... are among the most
readable to come out of Los Angeles (that) smartly combine outrage and
eccentric observations with levelheaded warnings about the loss of civil
liberties."
Steve Mikulan
The LA Weekly

Most
of Dr. Block's essays are reprinted in Counterpunch,
"America's Best Political Newsletter," edited by Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair

"So
thrilled to have you on our site, lending distinction and intelligence."
Alex Cockburn
Counterpunch

"Alex
and I love your stuff... So do most of our readers. The ones who don't?...well,
fuck em. " Jeff St. Clair
Counterpunch

" I am a newspaper
reporter and read a hell of a lot every day. I must say that your column
on Janet
Jackson at the SuperBowl was one of the funniest, most insightful
and brilliant columns I have read in recent years."
Paul
J. Nyden,
The Charleston Gazette